About me

Labas! (hello in Lithuanian)

My name is Milena, I am a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Program in Linguistics at Princeton University.  My mentor is Prof. Laura Kalin.

The primary focus of my research concerns syntactic theory and morphological theory. I am interested in the division of labor among the lexicon, syntax, and the post-syntax (specifically morphology and semantics). In my work, I explore the structure and nature of the extended verbal projection, in particular the assignment of Case and movement within this domain. I am also interested in the nature of syntactic atoms, specifically features, and their distribution in human language. My work draws on empirical findings based on my ongoing research on Lithuanian, an understudied Baltic language, in comparison to Latvian and Latgalian.  I also do fieldwork on Ndebele (Bantu language). My current projects are:

• Voice-Bundling in Complex Event Nominalizations (revised and resubmitted to NLLT) 
• LSA. Handout. Referential vs. Impersonal you in English (with Raffaella Zanuttini)
• Ndebele Reciprocals (with Asia Pietraszko)
• Ndebele Passive-like Impersonals (in prep)
• Mobile Affixation in Balto-Slavic, Lithuanian -si- (under revision in LI)
• Attributive N-N compounds in Lithuanian: a DM approach (with Yuriy Kushnir)
• Morphological Gaps (with Luke Adamson)

I received my Ph.D in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Julie Anne Legate. In my dissertation, I explored the relationship between Voice, case, and subjecthood.

RESEARCH TOPICS: Baltic Languages, Bantu Languages, Nominalizations, Passives vs. Impersonals, Voice,  Implicit Arguments, Impersonal Pronouns, Subjecthood, Structural vs. Non-Structural case Dichotomy,  Morphological Representation of Gender, Non-agreement, Definiteness, Kind reference.

COLLABORATORS:  Luke Adamson (ZAS, Berlin), Faruk Akkuş (UMass), Julie Anne Legate (UPenn), Yuriy Kushnir (University of Leipzig), Marcel Pitteroff  (Universität Stuttgart), Don Ringe (UPenn), Asia Pietraszko (University of Rochester), Einar Freyr Sigurðsson (Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies), Jim Wood (Yale University), Raffaella Zanuttini (Yale University).